The mother of a teenager victimized by a ring that sold sex with underage girls said she fears the sentence given Thursday to a woman involved in the operation puts her daughter in danger.

Denver District Court Judge Sheila Rappaport gave Angela Jeanine Ryan, 43, a minor player in the ring, a four-year suspended prison sentence with four years of intensive supervised probation, followed by three years of parole.

Ryan is one of 12 people who were indicted in December 2012 for using ads on Backpage.com to prostitute the girls, forcing them to walk the street and beating them when they didn’t comply.

Ryan, who the Colorado attorney general’s office said identified herself as a member of the Crips street gang, was charged with pandering a child and contributing to the delinquency of a minor. She reached a plea agreement with prosecutors and pleaded guilty to one count of delinquency of a minor.

“Since she was arrested in December, Angela has been out in the community, and I am aware of no incidence where she has been a threat to anyone,” Ryan’s lawyer Andres Guevara said.

But Lisa Hurtado, the mother of a now 17-year-old victim, said she is scared for her daughter. Hurtado said her daughter became so upset during Ryan’s sentencing that she began shaking in the courtroom.

“I’m extremely enraged,” Hurtado said. ” She is the one who would put my daughter on Backpage, gave her drugs and set her up with these perverted men.”

In a recent interview with The Denver Post, Hurtado’s daughter said she was 16 when she and some friends went partying with men they met at a liquor store.

At the end of the night, the friends told her to go with the older men, and the strangers took her home to her grandmother’s. Before she got out of the car, they said, “It was fun, let’s kick it again.”

When she met them the next day, she said, they told her that she was going to help them make money.

She thought they meant she would be selling drugs.
“I was like, all right, I can do that, that’s cool.”

But that wasn’t what they had in mind. “They said, no, you are going to be selling yourself.”

The ring knew where her grandmother lived, and told her if she didn’t cooperate, they would harm her family.

A general assignment reporter for The Denver Post, Tom McGhee has covered business, police, courts, higher education and breaking news. He came to The Post from Albuquerque, N.M., where he worked for a year and a half covering utilities. He began his journalism career in New York City, worked for a pair of community weeklies that covered the west side of Manhattan from 14th Street to 125th Street.

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